Data packets within a network equipment must be identified to a service and transformed appropriately for proper transmission across a network or to a client. This transformation includes control plane information appended to the packet data used within the network equipment and also frame header information of the packet itself (i.e., MAC address, VLAN tags, etc.) used throughout the network. This processing occurs on every packet, and therefore must occur at line rate to ensure no packet loss due to any processing buffer overflow.